A Postmodern Iconography: Vonnegut and the Great American Novel

A POSTMODERNICONOGRAPHY: VONNEGUTAND THE GREATAMERICAN NOVEL "Call me Jonah". The opening line of Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vomegut's end-of-the-world masterpiece, unmistakably echoes that of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's end-of-the-world masterpiece. Indeed, such echoes are audible elsewhere in Cat's Cradle, from the "cetacean" Mount MacCabe, which looks like a whale with a snapped harpoon protruding from it, to the great Ahab-like quarrel with God, humorously figured in Bokonon's thumb-nosing gesture at the novel's end. In pointing to Moby-Dick, as likely a candidate as ever was for the "great American novel". Vonnegut registers his own entry into the contest, but here it is also bound up in the laughable impossibility of the project. The novels of Kurt Vonnegut are not generally the first to come to mind when one thinks of the great American novel. Indeed, this latter, elusive thing-impossible and, perhaps, not even desirable-has long been a bit of a joke, the sort of thing an aspiring writer claims to be working on, or (even more likely) something a writer's parents, friends, and others say that he or she is working on. The great American novel is always a dream deferred; it cannot really exist, it seems, for that very reality would probably undermine any novel's greatness. The "great American novel" really belongs to the nineteenth century, not the twentieth. It existed there as a dream of writers and critics, desperate to carve a distinct national culture from the variously influential European traditions. By mid-century, many writers claimed that the great American literary tradition, one that would surpass its European forebears, was already beginning to emerge. Melville himself wrote, in 1850, "that men 164 Chapter Ten not very much inferior to Shakespeare, are this day being born on the banks of the ~hio".' The closing years of that century are filled with lamentations that the messianic promise of an earlier generation had not come to pass.2 The ideal great American novel would express an "American spirit", which is not the same as expressing a particular patriotic or nationalistic theme. It did not need to be set in America or even to feature Americans as its principal characters. It had, in a sense, to capture the essence of "America" in its totality. In the language of the narrator of ilrloby-Dick, the range must include "the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the universe, not excluding its suburbs"." Few writers have attempted the task as set forth in Moby-Dick, but many writers have tried to evoke its project in partial renderings. Although the "great American novel" is by now a joke, the underlying project seems to animate the works of many twentieth century writers, from Dos Passos to DeLillo and so on. Each age writes its own histories, of course. In the postmodem era, an era defined in large part by the perceived impossibility of comprehensive representation, a fragmented version of the project seems the only feasible way to go. Vonnegut's entire career might be characterised as an attempt to produce something like "the great American novel", but of its own time. Rather than depicting a representative American symbolic narrative, comprehensively bound in a single, emblematically American work, Vonnegut's novels as a whole offer a postmodern iconography, a sustained though fractured narrative of characters and themes that underlie that older project. Like Moby-Dick, Vonnegut's novels present a sprawling image of the multiplicity of American life, expressing the human, all-too-human, condition of its varied inhabitants. Perhaps recognising, as did Melville, that comprehensiveness is not really possible, Vonnegut presents a collage of figures, icons whose meanings are gently elicited by the plots rather than being legible on their faces. Vonnegut's collage is also indicative of the characteristically postmodem pastiche, in which the various styles of older art forms reappear in surprising places. Such pastiche extends also to Vonnegut's use of genres. Although his existential themes and heartbreakingly poignant sense of everyday life have won him critical praise, Vonnegut has often couched his observations in literature that seems marginal, featuring such B-movie genres as science fiction, dime-store magazine writing, slapstick comedy and even soft-core pornography (or, in the case of Breakfast ofChampions, all of the above). Vonnegut employs these genres, but his work cannot be contained by any A Postmodem Iconography: Vonnegut and the American Novel 165 of them. That is, it is not really viable to describe Vonnegut as a "science fiction" or "comic" author. Indeed, Vonnegut is not a typical novelist, and there is no type of novel that fits neatly with his sensibilities. Hence, Vonnegut's career may be seen as generically uncategorisable. This uncategorisable oeuvre presents a postmodern iconography, a scattered portraiture of American life at the very moment of its seeming transcendence (i.e., the postwar period of America's reign as a leading world power, with all the absurdity and horror that accompanies such reign). Throughout his career, Vonnegut's iconography advances a literary project-far too highfalutin a term, perhaps-to produce what Melville and others imagined the American novel could accomplish: an expression of the multitude and diversity of American life in its time. This is the project of the ever-elusive great American novel, and although Vonnegut has not produced this legendary work, he has reasserted the value of such a project in the postmodern world. Postmodernity It is far from certain that Vonnegut would characterise his own work as postmodern. Although his work does manifest many elements that are associated with postmodern fiction, such as metafictional techniques, use of collage or pastiche, and so on, Vonnegut has eschewed certain aspects of the postmodern and embraced many that we tend to view as modem or modernist. David Cowart has suggested that Vonnegut's work be viewed as a bridge between modernism and po~tmodernism.~This seems plausible, but it is also clear that Vonnegut's work embodies a kind of postmodern sensibility, a fellow-feeling for its place and time, that marks it as postmodern in a recognisable way. Understood historically, Vonnegut's work cannot function in the same way that the modernists' had. Of course, historical understanding may already be a modernist concept. The term, postmodern, has a notoriously slippery meaning, owing in part to the variety of uses to which it is put and of contexts in which it is asserted. In literature, the term began to be used by critics to identify post- World War 11 writers quite distinct 6om the modernists of a previous generation, modernists whose work was beginning to dominate academic literary criticism. Thus could the Beats, for instance, be distinguished from Joyce and Faulkner. In France, especially following Lyotard but drawing from the work of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, among others, postmodernism becomes a label to describe the cultural and philosophical condition of a world in which le grand ricits of modem societies (here understood in terms of the Enlightenment) no longer held true. And, 166 Chapter Ten perhaps most famously, in architecture, the term carried a polemical meaning (hinted at in these others usages), directly attacking the conventions and pretensions of modemi~rn.~In all cases, the label was meant to register a break with the modem, not merely to indicate posteriority. Fredric Jameson has characterised postmodemism as a cultural dominant, the artistic expression of late or multinational capitalism. Jameson specifically understands postmodem art as being fully integrated into commodity production. Whereas the modernists struggled with the problem of the work of art in the machine age, inventing forms which, in some cases, were meant to fully resist commodification, the postmodem condition is one in which the artistic and the commercial have become inextricably intertwined. (Here one almost inevitably thinks of Andy Warhol and Campbell's soup.) Architecture, of course, lends itself most effectively to this condition, since architecture always required a mixture of aesthetics and economics; the great postmodem buildings are monuments-in more ways than one-to the economic system in which they are produced. It is no wonder that finance capital and bank buildings come together in such gaudy skyscrapers, or that the flow of global capital can be articulated so forcefully in lavish hotels designed for the collective wish-fulfilment of international travellers. In addition to labeling a historical period, postmodernism has several aspects that distinguish it from its predecessors, modernism and realism especially. Any enumeration of such aspects is doomed to remain incomplete, since the very nature of the postmodem involves seemingly endless proliferations, like the lists found in DeLillo's novels or the brands of colas found in supermarkets. However, a few salient features are worth observing here. For one thing, as Jameson notes frequently, postmodemity is characterised by a certain lack of historical sense. As Jameson says of his own analysis, "It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodem as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first pla~e".~The domination of the "now" and the inability to think historically have a haunting, almost elegiac sense-at least from the modernist perspective; there is a disconnection with the past, a loss of shared history, that inevitably involves a break with a perceived community. Vonnegut will touch upon this aspect of the postmodem condition again and again.' This lack of historicity leads to a second characteristic of postmodemism: the subversion of time by space.

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